Email promotion campaigns are a series of emails within an automation that seek to generate a conversion. The conversion can be either trade for time (such as a consultation appointment) or for money (such as a product or service purchase).
While promotions may all have a similar setup in your email marketing tool, the way that contacts enter the promotional sequence may differ.
In this blog, we review three different ways contacts can enter promotional automation and how to set them up in your email automation tool.
3 Ways to Trigger Email Promotion Automations in ActiveCampaign
Behavior Based Trigger
A behavior-based approach triggers the email promotion automation when a contact performs a specific action. Types of behavior-based actions include visiting a website, clicking on a link, or even opening an email.
This type of trigger is really useful for evergreen promotions when you want to provide an offer to a lead at a time that makes the most sense for that contact.
You may also use behavior-based triggers to gauge interest in specific topics, products, or services – adding tags to users when they frequently visit a specific category of pages on your website. When a threshold of visits is reached, the promotion triggers.
An example of a behavior-based trigger is adding a contact to a promotion after viewing an offer page on your website. If the page is viewed, the contact will enter the automation. If a conversion is not made within a specific time frame, an email follow-up is sent to the contact.
The automation action is entirely based on the action of the contact and can trigger at any time.
Segment Based Selection for Email Promotion
Segmentation is a way to identify contacts based on their contact information. You can segment your contacts based on any information in your contact records. This could include location, tags, products purchased, date, etc.
Sometimes, when running a promotional email campaign, you will only want contacts that meet specific criteria to receive the email promotion. Therefore, you need to segment your contacts and then add them to the promotional automation manually.
This type of manual-based “trigger” works best when you have a one-time offer that you want only a select group of contacts to enter. It works well for standard monthly promotional campaigns and special offers.
Once the contacts are entered into the automation, they will proceed through the required steps, towards the promotion goal.
Interest Asking Based Trigger
The last type of email promotion trigger that I like to use is based on interest.
With interest asking, we are specifically asking the contact what they want to receive additional information on.
This is commonly used in welcome sequences and surveys.
With interest asking, the contact’s direct response will push the contact into the appropriate next action promotion automation.
This is especially useful when a business has a variety of funnels and you are looking to directly identify what will interest the contact.
Interest asking differs from behavior-based in that behavior-based works behind the scenes – interest asking is a direct ask of the contact.
How to Trigger Your Email Promotion Automation
There is no right or wrong way to trigger promotional automation – in fact, testing your automation with a variety of triggers will allow you to find what is most effective.
Regardless of what you choose, ensuring that your promotion is clear, specific and targeted towards a specific audience will increase your chance for conversion.
(And don’t forget, always test your automation before sending it to contacts!)
What is your next promotion and how will you use the methods above to increase your conversions?